Defense Nerds Strike Back: A Symposium on the Battle of Hoth

Maybe Vader lost bigger at Bespin. Image: Lucasfilm

So. You guys have really, really strong opinions about the Battle of Hoth.

Many took issue with my argument that Hoth represented a military debacle for the Galactic Empire. Some questioned the (meta)factual premises of my case (are TIE Fighters even capable of in-atmospheric flight?). Others argued that Vader was deliberately trying to lose, rendering my essay myopic. Still others desired to travel back in time and physically accost my childhood self, so as to spare me the error of even thinking about Hoth. Anger, fear, aggression: the dark side are they.

My responses are less interesting than those that others can provide. So we at Danger Room widened the aperture and brought in six military nerds — soldiers, academics, bloggers — with a similarly abiding love for Star Wars. Some agree with me, most disagree with me, and all add keen insights, except for when they disagree with me. In any event, check out their thoughts on Hoth, for the Force is strong with them.

Vader Lost Bigger at Bespin

If Hoth was a defeat for Darth Vader, as Spencer Ackerman contends, it was a short-lived one at best. Thanks to well-conceived contingency plans, and a judicious use of nefarious private military contractors, Darth Vader was still well along the path to achieving his ultimate strategic objective: turning Luke Skywalker to the Dark Side of the Force, and finally overthrowing the Emperor. Of course, Vader’s agenda only tangentially marries up with that of the Imperial Forces at large, and is cross-purposes with that of the Emperor. Thus, Vader’s true objective in the attack on Hoth is not the destruction of the Rebel Alliance, but rather, capturing Luke. In many ways, Darth Vader is a one-man shadow government, who seeks to find and shelter the religious extremist responsible for the greatest terrorist act ever perpetrated against the Empire — all to further his own personal political agenda.

Luke Skywalker may have escaped to Dagobah, sure, but Yoda saves Vader the expense and hassle of having to train young Luke. In fact, Luke’s escape actually gives Vader plausible deniability when Emperor Palpatine confronts Vader via hologram on Luke’s paternity.

Vader’s true strategic failure comes not at Hoth, but at Bespin, when he fails to turn Luke to the Dark Side. By the next film, Vader’s been removed from field command, relegated to overseeing defense contractors working on yet another flawed and bloated acquisitions program. And of course, in Return of the Jedi, it’s Emperor Palpatine’s turn to take the offensive, using Luke to dispatch his weakened apprentice, and carry on the Sith legacy. In Star Wars, intergalactic civil war is little more than a vehicle to advance the grand plan of the Sith.

Major Crispin J. Burke is a U.S. Army Aviator who blogs at Wings Over Iraq. Follow him on Twitter at @CrispinBurke.

Losing the Death Star Was Worse

If you ask Old Moff Tarkin, at the heart of the Imperial failure at Hoth are the failures of his subordinates during the Battle of Yavin 4. Had the Imperial Navy been able to protect a 3-meter vulnerability with all of the resources and TIE Fighters it had available, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The Death Star would have ended the Rebel Alliance then and there, and a galaxy cowed by fear would be kept in check by the Tarkin Doctrine.

This is not what happened. With the failure at Yavin 4 the Empire lost two of its greatest assets: a planet-killing doom gun and the strategist who understood it best. Grand Moff Tarkin’s fondness for enhanced interrogation techniques offends our modern sensibilities, especially when one of those interrogation tools is to blow up Princess Leia’s homeworld and everyone on it. But one doesn’t end up in command of the Empire’s deadliest weapon without a willingness to use it and the ruthlessness to use it for minor objectives. By threatening to destroy Alderaan, Tarkin forced Leia to reveal Dantooine as a rebel base. By destroying it anyway, he eliminated a world sympathetic to rebels, whose very princess had joined the rebellion, and denied a potential safe haven.

Had Vader not botched the defense of the Death Star, the Battle of Hoth would have been precluded and Grand Moff Tarkin would be rightly recognized as the greatest strategist the galaxy has ever seen. Or, if the rebellion somehow survived the destruction of Yavin to evacuate to Hoth, there is nothing in the Rebel defenses that could have prevented the planet from being destroyed. As others here discuss, this was not just incompetence on behalf of Vader, it was ulterior motives and willful failure. Betrayed by his ally, let down by his subordinates, and undermined by weak InfoSec against Bothans, the defeat at Yavin meant Hoth was lost before it had even begun.

Kelsey Atherton is Popular Science’s online Defense Tech writer, and the founder of Grand Blog Tarkin.

Did Vader really not want to win on Hoth? Were his forces merely overstretched? Image: Lucasfilm

Feel the Power of the Dark Side

Ackerman’s account of imperial tactics at the Battle of Hoth relies far too much on hearsay and questionable inferences. The Empire Strikes Back provides no evidence that Lord Vader intended to obliterate the rebel base from space. His orders to Admiral Piett are not to destroy every rebel ship, but to “deploy the fleet so that nothing gets off that system.” But such errors pale in significance to Ackerman’s disturbing lack of faith. He dismisses Vader’s approach as a “classic fiasco” of “theology masquerading as military judgment.” Ackerman clearly underestimates the power of the Force — and thus the strategic context of the Hoth engagement. The rebellion was a relatively “insignificant” component of the true battlespace of Star Wars: the Force itself and the Jedi-Sith struggle over its proper balance.

Star Wars chronicles a pivotal period in this conflict: the near-total victory of the Sith. Palpatine (Darth Sidius) rose to the position of Chancellor in the Old Republic by engineering a civil war between the Republic and the secessionist Confederacy of Independent Systems. As we all know, Palpatine used this conflict to lay the political and ideological groundwork for the creation of the Galactic Empire. But few historians appreciate the extent to which all of this amounted to a means to a different end: the revenge of the Sith in the form of the permanent eradication of the Jedi Order. The perpetuation of the Clone Wars distracted and corrupted the Order. The eventual Jedi attempt at a coup d’état against Palpatine — at a time of his own engineering — provided the pretext for shifting the entire security apparatus of the Republic-turned-Empire to the task of their destruction. By the time of the Battle of Hoth, this task was all but complete: Luke Skywalker was the only (known) threat to the ultimate victory of the Sith.

As other critics document here, a major feature of the Jedi-Sith conflict of this era involved the Sith Master-Apprentice dialectic. Attention to this dialectic reveals the tactical wisdom behind Vader’s choices at Hoth — choices driven by the overriding imperative of capturing Luke Skywalker — including his decision to lead the ground assault on Echo Base. Yes, Vader’s approach was undermined by the mistakes of his subordinates. Yes, Skywalker escaped. But capturing an extremely powerful Force-sensitive, even one inadequately trained, presents enormous difficulties even under the best of circumstances. Yes, the rebellion managed to survive their defeat at Hoth. But a broader appreciation of the rebellion puts it in its proper place: little more than a sideshow in the Jedi-Sith Long War. The outcome of that conflict depended entirely on the Palpatine-Vader-Skywalker struggle. Palpatine and Vader understood this reality, even if it eludes certain armchair Grand Moffs.

Daniel Nexon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He blogs at The Duck of Minerva.

The ground attack was a sideshow; the real mistakes were in orbit. Image: Lucasfilm

Hoth Showed Imperial Overstretch

The Battle of Hoth is difficult to understand without considering Imperial political order. Professor Daniel Nexon argues that empires maintain control through indirect rule and contractual relationships. The Empire is no exception, as coercion alone would be prohibitively expensive in a galactic polity. We don’t know how much wealth the Empire could draw on from its subordinate polities, but even an optimistic estimate still doesn’t change the fact that military operations in space require expensive capital-intensive military platforms, logistics, and expert technical personnel.

The Empire had no local partners on Hoth, and Vader commanded a large personal armada that was nonetheless barely adequate for the daunting task of completely blocking off both Hoth’s surface and orbital expanse. A much larger ground force with air superiority met with similarly subpar results during the Clone War’s Battle of Geonosis. In contrast, all the Rebel Alliance needed to do was evacuate its elites and reconstitute its forces elsewhere. As Graham Jenkins points out in this roundtable, the Rebels deserve credit for their tenacious — and effective — delaying battle.

Why didn’t the Empire devote more resources to Hoth? It’s hard to tell from the Canon alone. Maybe other political machinations necessitated competing Imperial deployments. Palpatine, intending to replace Vader with Luke Skywalker, may also have been wary about giving his heavy-breathing subordinate a larger force than the substantial units Vader already commanded. Finally, supporting large expeditionary forces and building the second Death Star likely strained Imperial finances. Despite Vader’s operational errors and structural disadvantages, the outcome was still dangerously close for the Rebel Alliance. Imperial command decisions were not the dominant factor in Imperial strategic failure.

Adam Elkus is a Ph.D. student in International Relations at American University.

Never mind Hoth, this is all about Vader’s tortured internal relationship with Luke! (Or something.) Image: Lucasfilm

What Matters for Vader Is Luke, Not Hoth

There’s one key element of the Empire’s failure at Hoth that Ackerman never fully explores when he warns not to “place unaccountable religious fanatics in wartime command”: To Vader, the Imperial force at Hoth — and the battle against the rebels — was a pretext for his real goal, finding Luke. He wouldn’t have minded wiping out the rest of the rebels, and he was happy enough to use the Imperial fleet to try to stop rebel ships (Luke’s ship) from leaving the system, but that’s not why he was there. Vader didn’t care at all whether or not they defeated the rebels that day. Understanding why that is requires understanding Vader’s personality.

Vader wasn’t a strategist, he was a tragic hero. He was Anakin Skywalker, supremely talented, painfully sensitive, devilishly impatient, stubbornly sure of his own rightness, and most of all ruled by instinct and emotion. Anakin Skywalker never listened much to what other people wanted him to do, no matter their nominal authority over him. He ignored his mother and Qui-Gon, resisted Obi-Wan on matters large and small, and defied the Jedi Council. He was passionate and impulsive, prone to leaping before he looked and taking off on unapproved missions if he felt they were right. He hared off to Tatooine after his mother against Obi-Wan’s orders. He married Padme in violation of the Jedi Code.

As unsuccessful as George Lucas might have been in depicting this, Anakin loved Padme so passionately and so beyond reason that he was willing to burn down the whole galaxy for just a chance to save her. Luke was his son, and more importantly, Luke was Padme’s son. As soon as Vader knew he was out there, Palpatine’s wishes no longer mattered, and Vader was once more in service only to his own motivations. He continued to follow the Emperor’s orders where it was convenient for him, but on Hoth and everywhere else for the rest of the series, he was doing what he wanted, to the inevitable detriment of the Empire’s military effectiveness.

Vader Forgot the Clone Wars

Ackerman’s discussion of the fiasco at the Battle of Hoth is fine as far as it goes, but makes no effort to understand the sources of Imperial failure. We shall concentrate on the ground assault, which was emblematic of the state of the late Imperial armed forces. The main Imperial ground force carried out a poorly organized frontal assault, over unbroken ground, against prepared defenses, with minimal provision for either air defense or air superiority, without integrated tactical airlift, without serious attempt to flank the rebel position, and without sufficient artillery. Although the Rebel base was reduced, Imperial forces took unacceptable casualties, and allowed a high proportion (over 50 percent) of fielded Rebel forces to escape destruction. Given the rarity of such an opportunity during the Galactic Civil War, this failure represented nothing if not a strategic catastrophe.

We do not speak of the sources of failure, but they should be well known. The first was the commitment of extensive resources to the construction of strategic weapons which could, by their very nature, make no tactical contribution. The second was the decision to abandon the tactics and procedures which had won the Clone Wars; well equipped clone armies honed to razor sharp conventional military effectiveness. We have little space here to revisit the destructive “Clones can’t do Counterinsurgency” debates that helped lead to a shift in personnel policies, but it is clear that these misguided efforts to defuse the rebellion by co-opting individual insurgents inevitably produced a force unready to fight high intensity, conventional battles against dedicated, well-equipped, and well-trained foes.

Instead, Imperial commanders marched blithely forward, relying on the strength of their armor in lieu of tactics, training, and professional excellence. To be sure, these failures were not limited to Imperial ground forces, as the Imperial Navy’s disgraceful performance at the Battle of Endor should make clear. The strategists of the Empire put technology and politics ahead of tactics, and individual proficiency became a joke; we saw the consequences not just at Hoth, but also at Yavin, Endor, and a dozen other battles.

Robert Farley is assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky.